Synchronic approach to polysemy

Synchronically polysemy is understood as the coexistence of various meanings of the same word at a certain historical period of the development of the English language. In the course of a synchronic semantic analysis of the world table all its meanings represent the semantic structure of it. The central (basic) place in the semantic structure occupies the meaning ‘a piece of furniture’. This emerges as the central (basic) meaning of the word, and all other meanings are marginal (minor) meanings.

The central meaning occurs in various and widely different contexts, marginal meanings are observed only in certain contexts. There is a tendency in modern linguistics to interpret the concept of the central meaning in terms of the frequency of occurrence of this meaning. The word table in the meaning of ‘a piece of furniture’ possesses the highest frequency of value and makes up the highest percent of all uses of this word.

Homonymy

Two or more words are homonyms If they either sound the same

(homophones), have the same spelling (homographs), or both, but do not have related meanings. In other words, if you hear (or read) two words that sound (or are written) the same but are not identical in meaning, you need to decide if it's really two words (homonyms), or if it is one word used in two different ways (polysemy).

Two or more words identical in sound form and spelling, or, at least, in one of these aspects, but different in meaning, distribution and (in many cases) in origin are called homonyms

Reasons for intense development of homonyms in English

Ø monosyllabic character of the language

Ø analytic structure of English

Ø predominance of free forms in English

Ø high-developed polysemy

Sources of Homonymy

Convergent development of sound form

Divergent meaning development